This specification relates to electronic data mining and reporting.
The Internet provides access to a wide variety of resources (e.g., images, video and/or audio files, search engines, news portals, gaming websites, social networking sites, as well as individual web pages pertaining to particular subjects). Access to these resources presents opportunities for advertisements to be provided with the resources. For example, a web page can include advertisement slots in which advertisements can be presented. Advertisement slots can be allocated to selected advertisers based on various matching criteria (e.g., keywords, bids, geographic region, time, etc.). Advertisements from the selected advertisers can be presented in the advertisements slots when the webpage is accessed by a consumer.
An advertising management system can be used to facilitate the value exchange between advertisers and publishers (e.g., search engines, web content publishers). For example, advertisers can use advertising management tools to create and manage various aspects of their advertising campaigns using campaign parameters such as ad groups, keywords, targeting criteria, budgets, bids for ad placement, delivery periods, advertisement types, and so on. After an advertiser has specified the campaign parameters and activated the advertising campaigns, advertisements can be dynamically selected and served on publishers' webpages according to the various campaign parameters specified by the advertiser.
The advertisers can also track the performance of their ad campaigns through the advertising management system. Performance metrics (e.g., number of conversions, impressions, clicks, conversion revenue, and so on) related to various aspects of the ad campaign (e.g., ad groups, targeting criteria, bids, keywords, advertisements, content matching methods, and so on) can be provided to the advertisers periodically or upon request. The advertisers can rely on the performance metrics to determine whether and how to effectively adjust settings of various aspects of their ad campaigns to improve the performance of ad campaigns.